Oh, hello. It's Friday night, so you must be waiting for me to start writing about the ephemera of my daily life. I won't disappoint you. Or maybe I will. Who knows.
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One thing that perhaps I've never mentioned is that I'm obsessed with my Fitbit, and will sometimes go to absurd lengths to get my daily steps in. And this is why I always walk around when I'm talking on the phone.
You already know where this is going, don't you?
So I wondered, as I paced the house while talking on the phone with my husband, if I was anywhere near 10,000 steps. I walked, and I talked, and I looked everywhere--in my handbag, in my coat pocket, in my car--for my phone, so that I could check the Fitbit app. How many steps do I have, I wondered; and more importantly, where on earth is my phone? I knew that I had brought it home, because I had heard it ringing. And then I had answered it, and had a whole conversation. And that's why I couldn't find the phone in my car, or my handbag--because I was holding it in my hand.
Stuff like that? All the damn time.
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It's Saturday now, and a beautiful day. We've had little to complain of this winter, cold-wise, but that has not stopped me from complaining, because I'd prefer for the temperature not to drop below 45 or so, at any time of the year, day or night. Freezing cold and snow in March after a warm and pleasant February seems like an insult, but the world probably deserves to be insulted right about now. And I don't even know what the weather has been like anywhere other than Maryland and the mid-Atlantic states. Everywhere else in the world might have had an entirely normal, seasonal winter, for all I know.
*****
I'm still reading Math Squared. Among the many things that don't make any sense is Hyperbolic Geometry, in which there are triangles whose three angles do not add up to 180 degrees. Except that the so-called triangles are stretched onto a curved surface, which means that they're not really triangles--they're loosely triangular things with curved sides. That's a shape, but it's not a triangle. Euclid's Fifth Axiom still holds, as far as I'm concerned. Too bad that I'm too old for the Fields Medal. Because that's the kind of brilliant mathematical insight that should win me a major award. Age discrimination is all too hideously real.
*****
I've avoided, thus far, writing about what's really important. A 14-year-old girl was raped at my son's high school last week, in a boys' bathroom, smack dab in the middle of the damn school day. Perhaps you have heard about it. It made national news, because the two perpetrators, 17 and 18 years old, were recent immigrants from Central America. Sean Spicer even mentioned it during the White House daily press briefing on Tuesday, because why waste a crisis? Why miss an opportunity to use someone's unbearable suffering to advance an agenda? Not that the Democrats are any better. But this isn't about politics; not really, anyway.
My son's school is a nice, clean, well-run suburban high school, in a nice neighborhood, with nice, involved, caring parents. So the natural shock and outrage and grief that does (and should) accompany such a horrible event was followed by a week and a half of listserv discussion and Facebook hand-wringing and accusations--against the school administration, against politicians, against conservative anti-immigration activists, against pro-immigration liberals, and against anyone who questions whatever political orthodoxy happens to be correct at the moment. It's hard to keep up.
(Side note: Our school system is one of the best in the country, but it's also a large bureaucracy, because we're humans and we haven't figured out yet how to run an endeavor that must serve so many people, rich and poor, of every conceivable ethnic background, from every imaginable variety of family, without quite a bit of bureaucracy. I believe in public school, but you have to accept that it is what it is. If you expect highly trained and professionalized school administrators to respond to parent concerns about anything at all, much less something so awful, in any terms other than carefully prepared statements and tightly organized meetings, then you're barking up the wrong tree. They can't be what they're not.)
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There's way more to this, of course. The town banded together. The anger and outrage subsided, replaced by expressions of support for the family, and declarations of unity and togetherness as a school and community. Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily. I just don't know how supported the poor girl and her family feel by a hashtag campaign and banners and posters and a school-wide wear-your-colors spirit day. This hideous crime has hurt the school and its students, but it's still a crime against only one young girl. She is the victim, not Rockville High School. And I wonder: Does she feel empowered by the stream of social media posts tagged #rockvillestrong? Does she see the hand-lettered bedsheet banners, and the giant #rockvillestrong made of plastic cups inserted into the chain link fence, and feel cared for and protected? Does she see the pictures of students clad in orange and black, and know that her fellow students stood up together to defend her? Or does she feel that the worst day of her life has been turned into a block party?
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Maybe that's not fair. Neither is life. I get that all of the social media outpouring and the orange and black spirit wear and the parents declaring how proud they are of our kids and our school and our community are all well-meaning gestures, born of good intentions. And that reminds me of something; a road somewhere, or something.
*****
That took something of a turn, didn't it? I'm much better at ephemera than politics or social criticism. Who am I to criticize? It's Sunday night now, which feels very different from Friday night. Some days or weeks change everything and you're never the same again. That happened to me, a long time ago, and now there's a 14-year-old girl who is maybe just now realizing that she'll never be the same again, either. I know her name, though of course I won't repeat it, not to anyone. I hope she'll be OK. I'll think of her often.
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